Much of what is powerful in this world is purely invisible. Wind and time and ideas all move unseen, altering everything as they go. To this category of imperceptible forces must be added editors, all-powerful in their selections, but most hidden from the reader precisely when their choices are so good they pass unquestioned. But occasionally, like shapes faintly reflected on a window through which we see a busy world, editors can be seen in what they offer. When Tracy Kidder selected essays for this series last year, essays suddenly seemed designed to celebrate the variousness of what human beings do and want and know. To read them was to be lent a wider appetite for life. The short stories of 1994, edited by Tobias Wolff, were by comparison somber, claimed less ground, spoke in a voice altogether quieter.

This year, with stories chosen by Jane Smiley and essays by Jamaica Kincaid, the spirit of each form is again different. The short stories are fresh, various, funny and faintly subversive, as real life is subversive when introduced on the page. Among the authors there are, in Smiley's words, "no elder statesmen." In general, the characters represented are typical of absolutely nothing. They're a bunch of jokers, one-of-a-kinds, set apart from others by incompetence or principle or uncommon experience, and caught in stories carefully made to be a little on the slant, like a snapshot of something you'll never see again. An annual anthology suggests the boringly official, but these stories offer something opposite in spirit--they follow not the grand, obvious avenues of life but its shortcuts and side streets.

We begin, with ironic appropriateness, with Daniel Orozco's "Orientation." Written apparently as a lecture to a prospective employee, it has the flat, mock-benign prose of a business pamphlet. What is described are both the overt routine of office life--"The men's room is over there. The women's room is over there"--and the far stranger things that are normally left unspoken or unknown. The above passage continues, for example, "John LaFountaine, who sits over there, uses the women's room occasionally. He says it is accidental. We know better but we let it pass." We pass Barry Hacker, whose wife's fatal illness was "completely covered" by corporate insurance. "Barry Hacker did not have to pay one dime." The late Mrs. leaves Voicemail "echoing from an immense distance within the ambient hum." Without further explanation we pass on to the loves, longings and dark secrets of the work force. Thus, with a mordant, deadpan humor, Orozco demonstrates the precise distance of our workday estrangement from ourselves.

In "Pagan Nights" Kate Braverman shows a similar taste for the offbeat as she tracks Sunny, a rock 'n' roll hopeful, unemployed and living in a van, who realizes that her charismatic drummer boyfriend will soon leave her "if she can't keep the baby quiet." The child is nameless, or rather is named several times a day--Gray, Willow, Sunday--after whatever crosses Sunny's path. Sunny's nature is summed up when she visits a small Idaho zoo and reads the placard in front of the snow leopard. "How long does it live?" she thinks. "Twenty-five years. Not quite long enough to see its first record go platinum." It is a brilliantly comic moment. But it is also scarily emblematic of her loyalty to that drummer boyfriend who wants the baby gone and is going to get his wish.

We travel further into singularity with Edward Falco's "The Artist," in which a drug dealer maintains his prestige by keeping the corpse of a policeman in his freezer. In "A Night's Work," whose characters resemble the roster of a Damon Runyon story, Jaimy Gordon offers us Nurse Pigeon, who discovers her dead boyfriend lying in the road and for reasons too complicated to explain here carries the corpse to his bookie.

Thom Jones' "Way Down Deep in the Jungle" is equally out of the common, concerning a bunch of nervously brutal, macho young doctors newly arrived at a hospital outpost in Africa. There the entertainment is a baboon named George Babbitt, who steals a bottle of Canadian Club and proceeds to get drunk on it. "When you've got a stoned baboon, all bets are off," says an old jungle hand, sagely.